oc3d Nvidia's RTX 3080 Ti is for gamers - Leaked Specs and Crypto-Limiter

[ENTERPRISE]

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Crypto-Limiter

New information has been leaked about Nvidia's rumoured RTX 3080 Ti, revealing that Nvidia plans to ship the graphics card with a cryptocurrency lock and 12GB of 19Gbps GDDR6X memory. 

 

This information was leaked by @kopite7kimi, a reliable leaker of future Nvidia products. Videocardz has additionally confirmed that Nvidia has delivered an update on their RTX 3080 Ti to their AIB partners. 

 

Koptite7kimi has previously revealed that Nvidia's RTX 3080 Ti could feature 10240 CUDA cores, placing the GPU 256 CUDA cores behind the RTX 3090. Contrary to older RTX 3080 rumours, koptite7kimi claims that the RTX 3080 Ti will offer its users 12GB of GDDR6X memory instead of 20GB. These new memory specifications will give the RTX 3080 Ti less memory capacity and more memory bandwidth, showcasing a major change to Nvidia's hardware strategy.   

 

Source

[BWG]

Yeah, if anyone picks up a crypto-limited card, please let me know. I would really like to compare it to non-limited cards on f&h.

[UltraMega]

I was reading today that these mining limiters are actually not so easy to bypass and they use a sort of driver + firmware marriage system that sounds similar to what Microsoft used to do with the disc drives in xbox consoles to prevent piracy. Found out the hard way once that you can't just replace a defective disc drive in an xbox 360 with a new one. 

Edited March 6, 2021 by UltraMega

[ENTERPRISE]

2 hours ago, UltraMega said:

I was reading today that these mining limiters are actually not so easy to bypass and they use a sort of driver + firmware marriage system that sounds similar to what Microsoft used to do with the disc drives in xbox consoles to prevent piracy. Found out the hard way once that you can't just replace a defective disc drive in an xbox 360 with a new one. 

 

I had an inkling they would do this. It certainly would not be enough just to do it at driver level as that is easy to bypass.

[Sir Beregond]

Part of me doesn't like this, but the fact that mining on the whole has moved towards massive data center farms instead of a gamer doing it in the spare time (although that still exists obviously) to the point that it has by a significant margin affected the GPU market, well, here's hoping these actually wind up with gamers instead of AIB's selling these to miners by the pallet.

[J7SC_Orion]

24 minutes ago, Sir Beregond said:

Part of me doesn't like this, but the fact that mining on the whole has moved towards massive data center farms instead of a gamer doing it in the spare time (although that still exists obviously) to the point that it has by a significant margin affected the GPU market, well, here's hoping these actually wind up with gamers instead of AIB's selling these to miners by the pallet.

 

...well, may be NVidia got the message re. the US Administration Review on tech shortages (CPU and GPU loom big in there). Of course, it's attempted purchase  of ARM might also mean that it wants to be seen to play nice and 'help'...then again, not so long ago, there was this:

  

[Diffident]

6 hours ago, J7SC_Orion said:

 

...well, may be NVidia got the message re. the US Administration Review on tech shortages (CPU and GPU loom big in there). Of course, it's attempted purchase  of ARM might also mean that it wants to be seen to play nice and 'help'...then again, not so long ago, there was this:

  

That's never been confirmed.  It was speculation by a RBC Capital Markets analyst based on Nvidia's total earnings, that exceeded expectations, and repeated over and over and over again.

[J7SC_Orion]

While it pays to have a healthy sense of doubt with all kinds of rumours flying about on the net that are unsubstantiated, RBC Capital analysts are usually well placed and also careful per their legal department...I would tend to trust those far more than the average self-appointed experts that populate social media.  This particular comment by RBC Capital came out after NVidia's official earnings call. It is also a question of GA102 / Samsung yields vs final products in open market channels.

 

Be that as it may, NVidia is a very aggressive company (see the Hardware Unboxed mess) and its planned purchase of ARM faces huge resistance from various sides, including apparently re. some early reads of regulators. Nvidia certainly wants to appear in the best possible light with multi-billion dollar deal regulatory reviews going on and facing stiff opposition. That's why I added that to my post above re. 3080 Ti mining 'blockers' and playing nice.

 

Be that as it may, you have unprecedented demand facing fairly tight supply with top-end Ampere, and that opens the door to all kinds of profit-taking side deals. There are plenty of rumours (and marked as such) that GPU vendors have trucks pulling up outside their factory's loading dock in China, with cards never making it to the regular sales channels but instead go straight to mining farms. Another confirmed Ampere supply issue are secondary sales channels by vendors. An example (note confirmation by MSI itself):

 

 

  

  

  

Edited March 7, 2021 by J7SC_Orion

[Paradigm Gaming]

The ancillary benefit of the collective of reports, data, rumors, posts and articles is that now it's in the mainstream media, it's a known problem, and there is high pressure on manufacturer's to fix the problem.

 

That's a step up from last year when it just sucked, but no one seemed to care about it.  The manufacturer's get their money no matter who buys their product.  I'm glad to see repercussions arising from it.  It may be the first incident where I've ever been a fan of social media influence.

 

We'll see how it progresses

[UltraMega]

I think there could be better solutions to this. For example, Nvidia could make miners secondary customers by limiting the way they distribute their inventory as well as limiting the number of cards a single person/account/payment method/shipping address can buy. 

 

If Nvidia simply controlled the sales by requiring any sellers to limit and track purchases to make sure people couldn't buy more than 1-2 cards within a certain timeframe, this problem would go away immediately. Maybe that means cards wouldn't be available at all on sites like amazon and newegg for a while but that's just a minor inconvenience. Whatever excess inventory they have after implementing purchase tracking would be made available to people who want to buy multiple cards/miners. 

 

The problem isn't that GPUs are good at mining, it's that no one cares if bots swoop in and buy them all ASAP. No human can keep up with that. Fixing the bot problem should be easy, but that's not the route they went and I don't like it at all. 

 

Another potential end to this would be if coin mining became so profitable that the hardware cost becomes negligible to the point that miners don't care if they can resell the hardware later so they can buy dedicated mining hardware instead. 

Edited March 7, 2021 by UltraMega

[Odyn]

nvidia is so dumb here ... the driver limiter only gimps ethash and related cryptos (ETH, ETC, other doggerino hashimoto algos). The 3060 can mine at full speed on other algos and doesn't do too bad. A 6x 3060 rig might be in my future for vertcoin or something.